Guangdong Province, recovering from the SARS strike in the past months, has put environmental safety at the top of its environmental agenda for 2003.

According to the Director-general of Guangdong Provincial Environment Protection Administration Li Qing, the decision comes in response to the need for safe disposal of medical waste produced in recent months in the fight against SARS.

The disposal of poisonous or hazardous waste has drawn wide concerns in the province.

During the SARS outbreak, the Guangdong Civil Waste Safe Disposal Center was faced with the daily problem of disposing of 35 tons of medical waste from Guangzhou and Foshan. The center has four locations in Guangzhou, Zhanjiang, Shunde and Sanshui.

However, about half of the medical waste produced locally had to be treated by the hospitals themselves - often with small incinerators only, and some was treated after being mixed with urban waste.

In fact medical waste is just a small part of the city's urban waste.

"There remains a gap for fulfilling the (environmental safety) plan made this year," said Li.

Statistics by the administration show that the province's civil waste amounted to 32.3 million tons last year, a figure that is increasing by 8 percent a year.

It is estimated that 37 million tons of urban waste will be generated by 2005.

To effectively prevent contamination by waste, or the risk of repollution, the industrialized disposal method should be adopted, said Zhang Kai, deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Provincial People's Congress.

In Fu'an County, Dongguan, some fish ponds, adjacent to a banana plantation which have almost dried up, are piled with rubbish, according to sources who have visited the county. The method adopted to remedy this has been to simply bulldozer the rubbish over with earth.

Some other waste is simply dumped by the roadside, on river banks or burnt in the open air.

"That's the cause of the re-pollution," said Zhang.

Many of the waste treatment plants were designed and built between the 1980s or 1990s.

The existing facilities fall far short of those which are needed to meet daily requirements, Zhang added. The provincial environmental administration is faced with an uphill struggle to improve such facilities.

(China Daily June 9, 2003)